On New Year’s Day I co-facilitated a telecall. One of my co-hosts, a mystic and seer, said something during the call that rang true to me: “We suffer only because we can’t stand not being who we are.”

I couldn’t agree more. I am blessed. For the most part, I get to be who I am. I know what my purpose is and am living it. My 4-year illness and the deep-dive of healing it forced me to take revealed it to me: I am here to help people use their own dark night of the soul challenges as the catalysts for their spiritual growth. And to be a guide for other healers. To help people bring the parts of themselves that split off due to trauma, and illness, and heartbreak, back home. I help people embody their souls.

I tell myself a story that I like: that my entire life has been preparing me to offer my sacred purpose. That I had to go through everything I went through to become who I am. That my journey from wounded healer to healed healer is part of what makes me me. And for the most part, I believe that this story is true. But up until this past year, I have to admit, I have been lying to myself.

Several years ago, I went through a four-year, dark-night-of-the-soul initiation of chronic physical illness, where I had everything stripped from me—my ability to function, my work in the world, many of my friends, and who I knew myself to be. I was in a free fall of uncertainty, and when I spiraled down to the bottom what was left was the Divine.

It was this relationship that sustained me.

In recent years, in my work as a somatic psychotherapist, healer, and guide, I’ve come to learn an essential lesson that’s made all the difference in my life: When “I” try and “heal” anyone from my own personal will, I end up feeling burnt out, exhausted, frustrated, and burdened from having taken on their “stuff.”

When on the other hand, I partner with the Divine,when I stop doing and start surrendering to that larger force of grace that has the ability to transform everything, miracles occur.

When we develop a chronic illness, our basic way of understanding the world dissolves. At least that how it feels. At least that’s how it felt in my case.

Somewhere in my 2nd year of living with severe multiple chemical sensitivities, I began to feel as if I were in a dying process. Not a physical death (though there were many nights when I wondered if I’d wake up in the morning), but a psychological death. I felt like my way of understanding who I was in relationship to the rest of the world, had been stripped. I was no longer a teacher, or a workshop leader. I was no longer a nature guide, or a healer. Hell, I wasn’t even someone who could buy groceries without feeling like I was going to pass out. I felt purposeless and adrift. Although I was doing everything I could to heal, I wasn’t sure I was someone who was healing. In short, I had begun the descent into the “underworld.”